New Open Source: Review App. Boost Your Code Review Now!

Have you ever really wondered about how you might improve the code review process in your organisation? Based on our own experience, the Netguru team has come up with a solution. Let me introduce you to Review App, one of our latest open source projects.

Have you ever really wondered about how you might improve the code review process in your organisation? Based on our own experience, the Netguru team has come up with a solution. Let me introduce you to Review App, one of our latest open source projects.

Code review is something we do during every project and we thoroughly recommend this process for any development team. Since there are about 100 developers here at Netguru, tight organization and clear communication is a must. Our quest to improve processes definitely has an impact on our overall workflow. During the hackathon we ran on the team retreat, the open source Review app came into being courtesy of Krzysztof, Maciej and Krzysztof.

Code review - revamped

We mostly communicate via Slack, and we trade our commits for review amongst each other there as well (using a separate channel - #tradeguru). As the code stays on GitHub, we thought it would be great to improve the flow of information between these two apps. That’s how the Review App idea came about. You could look upon this app as a platform that connects our Slack commit trading channel with GitHub. Now, Review App is the cornerstone of our code review process. Want to know how it works?

What Review app does

The application includes all the projects that our company is currently working on and stores the commits that are headed for GitHub. Moreover, it stores commit review statuses which will either allow a commit to be passed into the application build or discard it until improved.

The core features of the application are integrations with other apps: GitHub, Slack, and CircleCi, which vastly shorten the time of the code review process. There is even a separate Chrome extension (written in Ember, also open source) allowing you access Review straightaway.

Technicalities

The app relies heavily on GitHub webhooks. Every time someone pushes a commit, Review will receive a payload along with JSON data and all the commit information needed. Check out a sample payload included in one of the files of the app itself: indb/fixtures/payload.json. Based on this data, projects and commits are created. If this concept is new to you - hesitate no more and head over to GitHub API documentation.

We’re pretty sure that our app will be a great help for the code review process in your development team. Or, if you haven’t tried it yet - this solution will encourage you to give it a whirl. If you’re curious about other open source projects - check out this list and contribute to anything you wish. Thank you!